In times of rising numbers of extreme weather incidents paired with steadily growing ambitions to design very high and slender buildings, the correct assessment of wind loads on these structures is very important. As the surrounding terrain does also have a great influence on the wind field, it has to be considered thoroughly. The traditional wind tunnel tests are pushed to their limit, when it comes to modeling large scaled terrain and including a small structure here. Performing field experiments is usually too expensive. This is, where computational wind engineering (CWE) comes into play. The following work will present a fast and easy to use workflow to generate a numerical domain based on a digital terrain model, to which a structure can be added using an embedded approach. This workflow proceeds as follows: Gridded terrain data is converted into a format usable by a geometric modeling software, an automatic script extracts the desired extents and generates the meshed numerical domain, a structure is added using an embedded approach, and the complete domain is passed to a finite element solver for computation. This workflow combines all necessary individual steps and makes them assessable from a single user interface. This makes the generation of a numerical domain and the preparation of the numerical simulation very fast; paired with highly parallelized solvers, very large domains can be considered. The different approaches used in the workflow – the flow over a complex terrain feature, and the embedded structure – are validated separately in the scope of this work and are both found suitable for the workflow. Examples of simulated wind fields over complex terrain with embedded structures are also given, which show that the workflow generates reasonable results. The presented workflow helps to correctly assess wind loads on structures surrounded by complex terrain and can also be extended to evaluate the optimal location of these structures regarding the wind field.     «

In times of rising numbers of extreme weather incidents paired with steadily growing ambitions to design very high and slender buildings, the correct assessment of wind loads on these structures is very important. As the surrounding terrain does also have a great influence on the wind field, it has to be considered thoroughly. The traditional wind tunnel tests are pushed to their limit, when it comes to modeling large scaled terrain and including a small structure here. Performing field exp...     »